How do tasks impact the reliability of fMRI functional connectivity?

Abstract

While there is growing interest in the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging‐functional connectivity (fMRI‐FC) for biomarker research, low measurement reliability of conventional acquisitions may limit applications. Factors known to impact FC reliability include scan length, head motion, signal properties, such as temporal signal‐to‐noise ratio (tSNR), and the acquisition state or task. As tasks impact signal in a region‐wise fashion, they likely impact FC reliability differently across the brain, making task an important decision in study design. Here, we use the densely sampled Midnight Scan Club (MSC) dataset, comprising 5 h of rest and 6 h of task fMRI data in 10 healthy adults, to investigate regional effects of tasks on FC reliability. We further considered how BOLD signal properties contributing to tSNR, that is, temporal mean signal (tMean) and temporal standard deviation (tSD), vary across the brain, associate with FC reliability, and are modulated by tasks. We found that, relative to rest, tasks enhanced FC reliability and increased tSD for specific task‐engaged regions. However, FC signal variability and reliability is broadly dampened during tasks outside task‐engaged regions. From our analyses, we observed signal variability was the strongest driver of FC reliability. Overall, our findings suggest that the choice of task can have an important impact on reliability and should be considered in relation to maximizing reliability in networks of interest as part of study design.

Reliability of variability and complexity measures for task and task‐free BOLD fMRI

“…Previous work found reliability estimates of variability and complexity measures to be mostly similar across functional brain networks (Choe et al, 2017 ; Niu et al, 2020 ), but often report lower reliability in the limbic network (e.g., Elliott et al, 2019 ; Noble et al, 2017 ; Rai et al, 2024 ; Van De Ville et al, 2021 ). In general, the high proximity of the limbic network to the sinuses is thought to make it more sensitive to scanner noise/artifacts.…”

“…It may nevertheless be a wise strategy to strive for acquiring as much data as possible (in terms of blocks, trials, and/or time frames) per task. Several strategies exist to increase reliability of fMRI measures that go beyond acquiring more data (Dubois & Adolphs, 2016 ; Elliott et al, 2021 ), including the task design (Bennett & Miller, 2013 ; Gorgolewski et al, 2013 ; Rai et al, 2024 ), the use of multi‐echo or multiband fMRI (Cahart et al, 2022 ; Lynch et al, 2020 ), scrubbing for noise reduction (Phạm et al, 2023 ), data modeling (Hu et al, 2023 ), or functional network construction techniques (Jiang et al, 2021 ). Our results further suggest that using global indicators of brain signal variability and complexity, averaged across brain regions, appears a viable strategy to increase reliability.…”